Letters: Guns and state's rotten Democrats

Listen, I've got a cool movie plot: a ranting anti-gun left-wing Democrat state senator is secretly trying to sell terrorist machine guns and a missile capable of downing a jetliner over San Francisco. Too dumb even for a cheap action movie? After trying to criminalize every legal owner of anything that went bang, after demonizing law-abiding firearms owners for years, after making up absurd anti-gun lies day after day, our beloved Sen. Yee seems to have stepped in the doo-doo mighty deep.

Selling weapons supposedly obtained from Muslim terrorists in the Philippines to the FBI seems to top the ranks of even our usual government corruption, crossing over into outright terrorism and support for mass murder. It's big-time schadenfreude for the legal gun owners of California with three anti-gun Dem politicians arrested or convicted so far this year, but how many more hypocritical and rotten pols are still running this state and the country?

Frank Louis Blair Koucky III

Carmel Valley

Questioning public water merits

In his guest commentary of March 21, Roger Dolan expresses his support for Measure O, which is a step in the direction of public ownership of our local water company. I agree we need to base our upcoming votes as much as we can on sound facts. Accordingly, one of the rare scientific studies we found on the question of public vs. private ownership of water companies does not support the major contention of the Measure O folks that it will be cheaper than private ownership by Cal Am. The 2005 report by AEI-Brookings co-authored by a Stanford University researcher states: "We find that when controlling for water source, location fixed assets, county income, urbanization, and year, there is little difference between public and private systems" for systems that serve more than 100,000 people household expenditures on water at the county level decrease slightly as the share of private ownership increases, contradicting fears that private ownership brings higher prices. They conclude, "Overall, the results suggest that absent competition, whether water systems are owned by private firms or governments may, on average, simply not matter much."

Roger, please, let's hear what your sound facts are.

Lorin Letendre

Carmel River Watershed Conservancy

Speech freedoms crucial

Freedom of speech is not only guaranteed by the Constitution, but is obviously crucial to the workings of our society. Advances in technology are being used as opportunities for back-door attempts to interfere with our most basic rights. This is unacceptable in any democracy.

Arla McMillan

Carmel

Antibiotics heavy in our food

Animal farms in the U.S. food industry routinely use antibiotics to promote rapid growth. Producers can grow more animals in the same space and make greater profit through economics of scale. However, hospitals and medical facilities are becoming more concerned about the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria related to the routine use of antibiotics in our food supply — salmonella in factory farms and staph in hospitals.

An FDA report released in April showed that 81 percent of all the raw ground turkey the agency tested was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria were found in 69 percent of pork chops, 55 percent of ground beef and 39 percent of chicken.

An advantage of organic meat, poultry and eggs is that antibiotics are not commonly used or needed. The FDA has recently introduced a voluntary program to encourage farmers to reduce the use of antibiotics. Other countries have stepped forward to reduce the use of antibiotics in farm animals, but large agro interests continue to lobby our Congress.

Supporting organic meat producers will encourage the demand for organic and help reduce the price and, if your children need an antibiotic for a critical illness, there will be a better chance that an effective medicine will be there for them.

Dennis Knepp

Monterey

Role of gender in city manager race

I have several questions about the statement that Danial Pick "was the top man standing" in Monterey's recruitment of a new city manager. Does that mean that the search has been run like some sort of gladiator contest? Or that only men have been considered for the job? Was that language chosen only to grab readers' attention to the article? Don't you have editors to screen out nonsense like that?

Stan Dryden

Carmel

Taking a swipe at water company

This week Cal Am has been running expensive, color half-page ads in The Herald titled "Fix Your Leaks" as part of "Fix a Leak Week." It shows a smiling, pretty woman holding a pipe wrench to a shower spout just above the showerhead. Nice photo, but it makes no sense to place a pipe wrench on the bottom end of a curved shower spout. Furthermore, to tighten a showerhead, one would be applying not a pipe wrench, but a crescent wrench to the hexnut on the showerhead itself and not the spout pipe.

Now what is really ridiculous is that the ad reads: "A showerhead leak at 10 drips per minute wastes more than 40 gallons a month ... a leaky showerhead can be fixed by ensuring a tight connection using pipe tape and a wrench."

This statement is absurd; dripping shower leaks are not caused by loose showerhead connections, they are caused by worn washers in the hot and cold faucets below which control the pressurized flow of water to the showerhead.

How is it that Cal Am can be so ignorant of basic household water plumbing, then expect the public to save 40 gallons a month on idiotic advice?

Gordon Smith

Monterey

Frustrated with homework

I have been away from educational standards and practices for some time, and without children any longer in the system, I was quite overwhelmed with the Common Core theory and approach. Are current educators truly buying into this program? I think not. They are merely trying to keep their jobs and adapt to new parameters.

My exposure has recently been expanded by a fourth-grader who my office watches after school. English and vocabulary homework, no problem.

Math, though, has become the "elephant in the room." Basic division, fractions and decimal problems I can do in my head, having been taught the old-fashioned way, she had to go through 6 to 14 steps to arrive at the same answer that I achieved in fewer steps even on paper to show her. I haven't actually had to knowingly use these basic skills for a very long time, but when I need them they're there, because they're basic. She can't do that because the basic groundwork of repetition of fundamentals is being ignored.

Why do we need more complicated approaches to arrive at the same answer? Why are parents and grandparents being excluded from helping children with their homework? Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel when the wheel is still round?